Global Digital Marketing & Retail by Alex 116
Inspiration from across the world for retail enthusiasts, e-commerce professionals, marketing lovers and technology fans. Welcome back! I summarized some great links again, I stumbled upon this week.
Good morning from Thailand, I mixed this time a few posts about Thailand on things I saw and some generic e-commerce and digital news. Happy reading!
😅🇹🇭Time for a laugh: social proof at & Two Guys in Thailand
I always have to laugh when I see this “social proof” element in the tailor shops at sukhumvit road in Bangkok. There is a little picture of former president Clinton who shakes hands with the tailor. If you walk 200 metres further there is another tailor who uses the same picture 😅
Also found a “Two Guys” instead of the well known hamburger chain “Five Guys”. Two Guys is a lot cheaper (but of course it saves 3 guys) 😅
🇹🇭 Feature watch: Grab, Lazada app’s in Thailand
Now I am in Thailand I am using local apps again. Some things grabbed my attention like:
I noticed in Grab app that they have “Chinese speaking drivers” available. Against a premium price, but I am sure, most Chinese would use it. This taps into to, in my opinion a little different localisation as with other countries where this is not so common. Chinese outbound travel expectations are different then many other countries, you can see it at many places. They more or less expect Chinese payment systems, Chinese menu’s and an integrated digital ecosystem.
Lazada is also a great app to check features! Many features grabbed my attention but I like to share this one. The search bar has popular pre-filled search phrases, including with a “hot” label. It is a combination of popular searches and searches I did before, I found out. Interacting with the search field (so not the search button) redirects you to a specific search screen, so not even the search results page directly but a dedicated search page where you find your search history (you can delete it there also), popular searches and popular categories and only from there you can do your search.
Clicking on the search button goes directly to the search results page with the pre-filled search phrase results.Another Lazada one, is the search results improvement feature, at least that is how I call it. My guess it will be used to improve generic search results but for sure also the personalised ones. You get triggered at some of the search results overview pages by a little icon at the right corner, clicking on it results in the interaction as shown in the screenshot.
💸 Shopify Earnings call & AI enhancements
Shopify is a trailblazer in AI and the incredible amount of shops they have it’s very interesting to see how they utalize this. In the recent earnings call we see a bit of an answer to that question.
According to Shopify president Harley Finkelstein, the company’s advantage in the AI era comes from its ability to access the data from millions of merchants and billions of transactions, and its “founder mode” mentality to ship products quickly.
I think this is also pretty cool an internal tool to make better product development decisions. More companies should have this.
This also includes its internal tools, like Scout, which uses AI to help Shopify employees search hundreds of millions of pieces of merchant feedback to make better product decisions.
Also checkout “sidekick” an AI assistant to help shopify merchants be more succesfull.
On the merchant-operations side, Shopify’s Sidekick assistant is emerging as a key tool. It designed its on-platform AI system to help merchants analyze performance, segment customers and automate marketing or operational tasks. More than 750,000 stores used Sidekick for the first time in the third quarter, generating 100 million conversations, according to the company.
And they really do an effort to migrate from a platform to a commerce infrastructure with seperate “modules” or “components” that you can use. So you don’t have to right away purchase the complete platform you can also just use these optimized “components”.
At the core of that strategy is Shopify’s Commerce for Agents toolkit. It includes what Shopify calls Catalog, Universal Cart and Checkout Kit. These products allow external AI assistants to pull product data, assemble shopping carts and load checkout, enabling buyers to complete purchases inside conversational platforms.
https://www.shopify.com/news/bfcm-sidekick
https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2025/11/05/shopify-deepens-push-into-agentic-ai-b2b-ecommerce/
https://ww.fashionnetwork.com/news/Shopify-upgrades-sidekick-ai-assistant,1727352.html
🤓The content hub creation workflow , great post!
Most companies make separate pages and hope Google likes them. This article says: stop that. Build a real content hub like a house, with a plan, not random bricks.
I agree fully on it and I share it here because it really explains the steps that you can take. This goes beyond what you would think at first thought.
It gives 8 clear steps to become the go-to source on your topic. Not just for Google but,for AI as well.
It starts with an audit (find what’s broken)
Maps user feelings (not just keywords)
Tells you what to write, update, and link
Even plans the next 6 weeks
Yes, it takes time to set this up. But one good hub beats 20 okay-ish pages.
Save it. Use it, if you work at a company or if you are an agency this is a real useful framework!
🇹🇭 🇯🇵 Introducing the Don Donki App
Everytime I am in Asia I visit Donki, great store and I like it especially because of their on and offline integration, but I never was able to use their app, as they restrict download per country registration (unfortunately, because they do promote the app in English for tourists as well). Anyway, I now downloaded the apk and side loaded it on my phone so I could see how it looked like, and that’s actually pretty nice! Full of promotions, a happy friendly interface and lot’s of loyalty programmes. Take a look at the video (and some screenshots).
If you scan a product’s qr code they also ask people “do you want to buy this product again”. Very nice, you also see the reply’s to this question when you scan a product in store.
Take a look at the back of the receipt I got. Also smart I think they do not have their own delivery service, but they use third party delivery services. Smart so they can keep costs low. They sell the fun, treasure hunt vibe in store (really this is a treasure hunt store), but outsource the boring (and expensive) part delivery to platforms that already dominate the region like Shopee and Grab.
It’s also very easy to give feedback to a store via multiple routes in the app. Meaning they probably do a lot with user feedback making it so easy.
More on Donki? Checkout a previous edition of my newsletter (edition 46) including a short store tour:
💡Daily transactions placed in cash around the world
I’m in favor of cash and believe it should always remain accepted. At the same time, I’m a big fan of digitization, as long as it’s built without limitations and with full transparency. Digital payment infrastructure should always be available, fast, and reliable.
This is a pretty cool chart I think to see where people still use cash around the world, I see a few things:
See the difference between two countries directly next to each other: Germany (40-50% cash) and Netherlands <20%). This is both a cultural and infrastructure difference.
It’s not always said that an advanced digital economy also has an advanced digital payment system, take a look at Japan for example with also around 20% of cash transactions. (having written that, I know Japan is less digitzed then f.e. South Korea)
When I regularly traveld to Sweden back in the 90’s, the Swedes were already very high in adopting digital payments, Credit Cards back then. It surprised me, as it was in Sweden more digitized then in Netherlands. That still is the case and with <5% of cash transactions and of course the e-kuruna pilot.
In Africa the situation is different, with low bank penetration and informal economies, there often hybrid models appear where users link mobile phones to accounts for payments, transfers, and microloans. Basically you put cash on your mobile account at a vendor and then you can pay digital (in very short).
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Checkout my archive of previous newsletters if you want to read more :